Kevin Drum finds a truth
Jan. 21st, 2010 08:15 amMike Potemra at National Review Online recently posted one of the silliest things to appear on those unintentionally comic pages, leading Kevin Drum to post this amusing observation:
Kirk (after Oakeshott) rightly understood that "conservatism" isn't really an ideology or a political position: it is, and best, a sentiment. Embracing Kirk's third principle of "the prescriptions of antiquity" as a sort of gospel, modern conservatives, even the smart ones, have neglected Kirk's tenth priciple: "The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society."
Picard (and Kirk before him) embody a recognition that change is inevitable. I disagree with many of Picard's more over-the-top rejections of "technologies man was not yet meant to have," and the post DS-9 institutionalization of that sinean anti-progressivist impulse in the form of the Section 31, but in the general sense Starfleet, envoiced by Picard, allowed a modicum of progress in much the same way that the Chinese government allows a modicum of progress but makes heavy-handed decisions about what progress "the people" may and may not have. But denying all change would be insane and obvious, so Starfleet adopts a bread-and-circuses attitude toward the slow accretion of progress.
In the real world, the citizenry of the United States seems ready to embrace those oligarchal steps: we don't really care about what corporations know about us as long as we get enough food, sex, shelter, and entertainment. We worry about what the government will do because the government seems to have more power, and therefore the power to shift suddenly.
Modern conservatism has responded by encysting into a time-wasting entity, the movement of "No, no, no!" No progress is acceptable. Any progressive idea is so beyond the pale that the right controls the idea of "what is the center" and has successfully dragged it right. The health care delivery bill, that "insane," "radical," "socialist," bill, is pathetically far to the right of what every other modern state has, and far to the right of what the Clinton administration proposed back in 1993. Meanwhile, our government has turned over the very act of regulating trade to private intellectual property lawyers.
Potrema's little outburst shows how this malignancy has infected common discource: he mocks "peace, tolerance, due process, progress," because "the other side" proposes those. We're down to tribalism: my team versus your team, and I don't care what the team is actually saying and doing.
From Mike Potemra, over at National Review Online:John Holbo piles on:I have over the past couple of months been watching DVDs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show I missed completely in its run of 1987 to 1994; and I confess myself amazed that so many conservatives are fond of it. Its messages are unabashedly liberal ones of the early post-Cold War era &emdash; peace, tolerance, due process, progress....You know, conservatives don't usually confess straight up to finding peace, tolerance, due process, and progress so disagreeable. But I guess they slip up every once in a while.
Poterma forges on:I think this may be serious grist for the story mill, because it implies what happens when Kirkean values mestastasize into what has become modern "conservatism."I asked an NR colleague about it, and he speculated that the show's appeal for conservatives lay largely in the toughness of the main character: Jean-Luc Picard was a moral hardass where the Captain Kirk of the earlier show was more of an easygoing, cheerful swashbuckler. I think there's something to that: Patrick Stewart did indeed create, in that character, a believable and compelling portrait of ethical uprightness.But surely the proper conclusion to be drawn, then, is that being an ethically upright and generally virtuous person is, however surprising this result may be, consistent with being tolerant, peace-loving, even with upholding due process. And there is no particular difficulty to the trick of being in favor of progress while being skeptical about human perfectibility. I say this is a semi-serious point because I think, for some conservatives, the main objection to a somewhat vaguely conceived set of liberal values really is a strong sense that they are inconsistent with a certain sort of hardassery in the virtue ethics department.
Kirk (after Oakeshott) rightly understood that "conservatism" isn't really an ideology or a political position: it is, and best, a sentiment. Embracing Kirk's third principle of "the prescriptions of antiquity" as a sort of gospel, modern conservatives, even the smart ones, have neglected Kirk's tenth priciple: "The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society."
Picard (and Kirk before him) embody a recognition that change is inevitable. I disagree with many of Picard's more over-the-top rejections of "technologies man was not yet meant to have," and the post DS-9 institutionalization of that sinean anti-progressivist impulse in the form of the Section 31, but in the general sense Starfleet, envoiced by Picard, allowed a modicum of progress in much the same way that the Chinese government allows a modicum of progress but makes heavy-handed decisions about what progress "the people" may and may not have. But denying all change would be insane and obvious, so Starfleet adopts a bread-and-circuses attitude toward the slow accretion of progress.
In the real world, the citizenry of the United States seems ready to embrace those oligarchal steps: we don't really care about what corporations know about us as long as we get enough food, sex, shelter, and entertainment. We worry about what the government will do because the government seems to have more power, and therefore the power to shift suddenly.
Modern conservatism has responded by encysting into a time-wasting entity, the movement of "No, no, no!" No progress is acceptable. Any progressive idea is so beyond the pale that the right controls the idea of "what is the center" and has successfully dragged it right. The health care delivery bill, that "insane," "radical," "socialist," bill, is pathetically far to the right of what every other modern state has, and far to the right of what the Clinton administration proposed back in 1993. Meanwhile, our government has turned over the very act of regulating trade to private intellectual property lawyers.
Potrema's little outburst shows how this malignancy has infected common discource: he mocks "peace, tolerance, due process, progress," because "the other side" proposes those. We're down to tribalism: my team versus your team, and I don't care what the team is actually saying and doing.
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